A deal worth considering: TextNow’s $19-a-month mobile plan

Ars reviews this offer—even if it requires an older-generation Android phone to work.

Psst, wanna pay under $20 a month for your cellphone service? Seriously. This is a real deal but it comes with some fine print. You must use one of two older-model Android phones, and you have to use a Wi-Fi network to make calls when available (don’t worry, that process is automated).

Last month, we reported on TextNow, a Canadian startup offering 500MB of data, 750 rollover minutes, free incoming calls, and unlimited texts to American mobile users. After using TextNow’s service for about two weeks, I can say that it generally works. And, my God! It’s cheap—less than $1 a day! Almost anything at that price is worth weighing the pros and cons.

The mobile land$cape

Ever since my wife and I moved back from Europe, I’ve pined for a European-style (really, rest-of-the-world style) top-up, pay-as-you-go mobile phone service in the US. It’s common in nearly every country across the world to have a system where you load up your phone with credit to make calls/texts, don’t pay for incoming calls/texts, and can pay a little bit more for a prepaid Internet plan for a week or a month.

TextNow adds an easy toolbar up top for its own app.

Cyrus Farivar

In Germany, we spent roughly €40 ($53) a month combined for prepaid access on our phones. It cost us €0.09 for outgoing calls to any German number, €0.09 a text to any German mobile, and €10/month for 1GB of 3G data.

Here? We use Straight Talk on two unlocked iPhones, which runs us $90 a month for unlimited minutes and text messages and probably somewhere around 2GB (but certainly not unlimited) of 3G data. (Currently, I’m rocking the iPhone 4 on iOS 5, but Straight Talk just moved to support LTE as of last week.) Now, $90 for two iPhones is still a fraction of what most Americans on contracts are paying. By comparison, Ars Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson and his wife, who get a corporate discount, pay $150 together for two iPhones.

American mobile phone users are by and large saddled with overpriced contracts. If you’re reading this, chances are you have a contract with one of the American big four carriers: AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, or Verizon. It's possible you’re a savvy shopper and realized that there’s money to be saved by switching to a no-contract prepaid plan or by using a mobile virtual network operator (in industry-speak, an MVNO—these include Virgin, Boost, Cricket, Straight Talk, and many other companies that lease spectrum from one of the big four).

In light of this, I’ve been on the hunt for the best mobile data deal in the US. I’ve covered the Canadian startup, Ready SIM, which seems fine for short-term travelers to the US. I've explored the Belgian startup, Mobile Vikings, which offers €12 ($16.36) per month for 2GB of data. TextNow is the latest entrant into this cost-cutting competition.

Getting set up

I've used the iPhone in its various iterations for over five years now. Since then, I’ve maybe used an Android phone for about 20 seconds, tops. But TextNow was nice enough to loan me a Samsung Galaxy S II to test it out. (As Ars Android Editor Ron Amadeo warned me, “Just know you are using an extremely old, extremely crappy Android phone.”)

Before letting device envy immediately count you out, consider the rest of the field here. Republic Wireless, a rival to TextNow that operates on essentially the same business model, announced this week that it would offer the Moto X to customers. It seems likely that if Republic can pull this trick—bringing newer phones to the fold—TextNow might not be far behind.

As for the S II, once I got the phone set up and connected to my Google account, it seemed fairly straightforward.

Cyrus Farivar

Like Republic Wireless (also a Sprint MVNO), TextNow puts its own application onto the phone that effectively hijacks the dialer, likely through a modified bootloader. This means you can’t easily upgrade the Android firmware without breaking the entire VOIP setup.

"We're working hard to be able to support more phone models, but there are proprietary things we need to do to make the phones work with our technology before we support it,” TextNow CEO Derek Ting told me. "We make minor changes to the phone for it to work seamlessly with our all-IP voice and SMS platform.”

When you make a call over Wi-Fi, the TextNow handset uses the Internet connection. And when that connection is unavailable, it switches to Sprint’s network. Unfortunately, there’s no handover. If you start a call at home over the Internet and walk out of your house, you’ll have to start that call over once you’re out of range of the Wi-Fi.

Qualitatively it works very similarly to a call over Skype or your favorite VoIP service. With a fast enough connection it generally works well, but sometimes there are delays and quality issues that aren’t present on a traditional call. After using it over the course of several days and conducting interviews on it, a few reported slight distortion on the line. This is despite the fact that my Wi-Fi router is on my desk, where I make most of my calls.

Although I discovered my immediate neighborhood of Oakland doesn't have perfect Sprint coverage (compared to AT&T), taking the phone with me out into the world worked just fine. While using the Sprint network, I texted, called, and surfed without any issues.

At home where my Wi-Fi is the most reliable, no one who didn't know I was using a different phone commented on their inability to hear me or anything like that. I definitely experienced, on occasion, some delays or words getting garbled like I would if using Skype. It's not a huge deal, but sometimes when those delays last 10 or 20 seconds it becomes frustrating. Still, most of the time in my experience, TextNow's setup worked pretty darned well.

Drumroll, please

When Ting first sent me the loaner S II, he configured it to include 50,000 minutes or 833 hours—more hours than there are in a month. Bemused by that ridiculous amount, I asked him to remotely reset it down to normal levels.

Customers pay a monthly fee of $19 for 500MB of data (and 750 minutes), $27 for 1GB of data (and 1250 minutes), and $40 for 2GB of data (and 2,000 minutes). In my experience, I only used maybe 50 minutes for around two weeks. I primarily text and e-mail, reserving phone calls only for close friends, family I don’t get to see in person very much, and people I need to talk to in my capacity as a journalist.

TextNow gives you the option of adding minutes and data later while you’re in the middle of the month. And if you’re too cheap to buy minutes, you can “earn” them by watching ads or downloading partner apps. In other words, there isn’t this weird savings calculus with TextNow. No more figuring out how many minutes you’re going to use on your phone so you can stay just under to avoid overage fees but not so low as to waste money.

But at the end of the day, would I give up my iPhone and switch to TextNow? Sadly, no.

This could be simple personal preference, but the iPhone's ease of use outweighs TextNow's savings. The same may be true for any smartphones more modern than the S II. Plus, I currently travel overseas a fair bit and care about having an unlocked GSM phone. TextNow's current offering puts a bit of a damper on my ability to swap SIMs when I land in Estonia. If I could use TextNow (or something similar) on my iPhone, I definitely would switch in a heartbeat even if it meant relying on Wi-Fi calling at home.

If losing a bit of modern functionality in your hardware doesn't bother you, TextNow will absolutely save you some money month-to-month. If you rely on your smartphone too heavily, the opportunity costs with TextNow may be too high. Still, no matter your outlook, it's encouraging to see more companies like this sticking it to Big Mobile. TextNow has the start of something appealing.

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar

T-Mobile's newest plan is so much better. On our family plan we get unlimited minutes, unlimited text messaging, and 500 mb of data (each, not shared). Two of us pay $25/month each and and the other two of us pay $10/month each. We also have the option to add a fifth line for another $10/month. This is all on our nation's fourth largest carrier; sans MVNO. If your not the family type, just find some trustworthy friends and get on a family plan.

If you have good AT&T coverage you could give Airvoice a try. $30 a month unlimited text, voice and 100MB data. $40 has 1GB data, $60 I believe has 3GB. US customer service. Great service for talkers like me.

The t-mobile $30 plan is very skimpy on minutes. But T-Mobile does support wifi calling. Even UMA if your phone is capable. The problem is T-Mobile wifi calls still count against your minutes.

It think if you supplement the $30 plan with a SIP service, you have a decent deal. It would help to have a phone that supports headless apps, though it isn't a requirement. Check out the Adore softphone app. I'm not sure where it pulls it's CODECs, but you can even do HD voice on the app. Adore is multi-platform.

Note I haven't found one MVNO that let's you use their LTE. Well I haven't looked at Sprint because...well...it is Sprint! T-Mobile 4g (as opposed to their LTE) seems to have a lot of latency. T-Mobile LTE on the other hand is great. I get 33 to 38 mbps down and about half that up.

Note I haven't found one MVNO that let's you use their LTE. Well I haven't looked at Sprint because...well...it is Sprint!

Well even though it is Sprint I use Virgin Mobile and while the 4G LTE coverage in my area is spotty (meh, I didn't really buy it for the 4G) I've seen it pull down 15mbps or so when I can connect. I think if the tower density was higher it'd help (right now to my knowledge the 4g towers are in the initial phase of rollout here, so 4G coverage is in specific areas only.) I'm using the Samsung Victory with ICS.

Italy. Provider: Wind. Mobile - 6 Euro a month ($5?) for 120 minutes of calls, 120 SMS and 2Gb of as-fast-as-possible-at-the-time internet which becomes 32Kbs after the 2Gb limit is reached. Free Italy calls.0.20 Euro per min. average to call international (China is 0.02 per minute).

I might be unusual in that I find 100 minutes to be enough, but even the months that I've gone over, at 10c/minute, an additional 100 minutes brings the whole monthly cost to just $40.

And as you say, VoIP is an option: until Google kills Voice later this year, I use voice over data through GrooveIP for calls and it works fine. The quality is decent, though it took me some tweaking to get the echo and other settings right.

I just wish incoming calls were free, like they are in other parts of the world. I have relatives who don't realize that :-/

The t-mobile $30 plan is very skimpy on minutes. But T-Mobile does support wifi calling. Even UMA if your phone is capable. The problem is T-Mobile wifi calls still count against your minutes.

It think if you supplement the $30 plan with a SIP service, you have a decent deal. It would help to have a phone that supports headless apps, though it isn't a requirement. Check out the Adore softphone app. I'm not sure where it pulls it's CODECs, but you can even do HD voice on the app. Adore is multi-platform.

Note I haven't found one MVNO that let's you use their LTE. Well I haven't looked at Sprint because...well...it is Sprint! T-Mobile 4g (as opposed to their LTE) seems to have a lot of latency. T-Mobile LTE on the other hand is great. I get 33 to 38 mbps down and about half that up.

I'll second the Ting (the company, not the CEO) option. If you can stomach Sprint and you are a light user, you can save a ton of money. If you're a heavy user, the plans aren't that great. But being able to keep a device activated (be it a phone or a hotspot) for $6/month is nice. There's no billing surprises if you go over your selected "plan", you're just rolled into the next one.

One thing to note with the wi-fi calling on TextNow is that the problems with call quality may not actually be with the service, but with the phone/voip software. I have a few VoIP lines at home, and with standard VoIP phones or TAs, all of which are cabled to the network, service is flawless with multiple carriers. I also have a VoIP client on my phone, and while it works, the quality is not as good as the other phones. My phone is old (older than that Samsung), and I suspect that the occasional glitches I hear are the phone simply running out of horsepower as some other app wakes up and grabs email, checks the weather, etc. And the ping time on the phone's wifi has always been much higher than other devices on the network. And the software has been generally flaky at times. I suspect this is not unique no matter what platform you're running... It's very promising - I've actually used the VoIP client over 3G and it worked better than I imagined, but I don't think all the pieces are there yet for reliable VoIP on a phone. Close though...

That said, it sure would be nice if it were easier for end users to swap out the stock dialer and SMS apps for something that allowed more flexibility in how you route your calls/SMS. I don't see that happening in the near future though.

On a UK prepaid sim only service I can pay £10 ($15.80) for a month of unlimited texts, 500 minutes and 1GB Internet (it would be £12 for unlimited data). Some of the prices quoted sound astronomical in comparison.

How is TextNow's service terms when it comes to respecting the privacy of their users? That seems like something every overview should include now: Voice minutes, text minutes, internet bandwidth, assumption of privacy creating a reasonable expectation of privacy in the user?and price.

Paying to recieve calls is what I always find most astounding about USA.

Is this because the caller would otherwise pay more to dial a cellphone, and cannot differentiate by the number?

---

I btw. pay 25USD a month in Denmark, unlimited free calls, SMS and MMS. 5GB data, which throthless to 256kbit sec after that at no extra cost. We have more than 80 cellphone carriers here which helps with competetion (they all lease with one of the 4 national carriers though).

What I hear is that the EU is working on harmonising the cellphone market, to remove roaming charges. Thus massively increasing competetion, like by a factor of 50.

Yep. Also comes with unlimited texts. And as mentioned earlier in the thread, combining Google Voice with certain apps like GrooveIP or Talkatone lets you do voip calling that doesn't count against your minutes.

Paying to recieve calls is what I always find most astounding about USA.

Is this because the caller would otherwise pay more to dial a cellphone, and cannot differentiate by the number?

---

I btw. pay 25USD a month in Denmark, unlimited free calls, SMS and MMS. 5GB data, which throthless to 256kbit sec after that at no extra cost. We have more than 80 cellphone carriers here which helps with competetion (they all lease with one of the 4 national carriers though).

What I hear is that the EU is working on harmonising the cellphone market, to remove roaming charges. Thus massively increasing competetion, like by a factor of 50.

It dates back to when carphones cost a dollar a minute ($2-3/min after inflation) and the carriers wanted to keep people from placing a 10sec "call me" call outbound on the phone and then having a long free call when the other person called them back.

Paying to recieve calls is what I always find most astounding about USA.

Is this because the caller would otherwise pay more to dial a cellphone, and cannot differentiate by the number?

---

It dates back to when carphones cost a dollar a minute ($2-3/min after inflation) and the carriers wanted to keep people from placing a 10sec "call me" call outbound on the phone and then having a long free call when the other person called them back.

Here in Europe you usually pay a certain rate depending both on the kind of number you're calling (landline? mobile? foreign?) and on the kind of plan you use to make the call (landline? specific mobile plan?). If you call from landline to mobile, it's going to be more expensive than from landline to landline, but the caller pays for everything all the time (up to the border). Only if the receiver is in a country that is not his own does he pay a certain extra amount for receiving the call, on top of what the caller pays. The reason is that the caller cannot know whether or not the receiver is in the receiver's own country, so it would be unfair to surprise him with extra costs. So you always know what you are paying per minute as the caller (a mobile number starts with certain digits).

So let's say I am a Dutch landline and I'm calling a Dutch mobile number that happens to be on vacation in Belgium. I then pay the normal rate for calling to a domestic mobile number as specified in the contract of my landline, and the receiver pays the rate specified in his (Dutch) contract for "receiving calls in foreign country x". The latter varies per country, although it is now the same rate for all foreign EU countries. If my friend calls me, in the same situation, he pays the rate specified in his mobile contract for "calling from foreign country x", and I as the receiver pay nothing, because I am in my own country. Calling from a foreign country is typically more expensive than receiving in a foreign country.

I might be unusual in that I find 100 minutes to be enough, but even the months that I've gone over, at 10c/minute, an additional 100 minutes brings the whole monthly cost to just $40.

And as you say, VoIP is an option: until Google kills Voice later this year, I use voice over data through GrooveIP for calls and it works fine. The quality is decent, though it took me some tweaking to get the echo and other settings right.

I just wish incoming calls were free, like they are in other parts of the world. I have relatives who don't realize that :-/

The t-mobile $30 plan is very skimpy on minutes. But T-Mobile does support wifi calling. Even UMA if your phone is capable. The problem is T-Mobile wifi calls still count against your minutes.

It think if you supplement the $30 plan with a SIP service, you have a decent deal. It would help to have a phone that supports headless apps, though it isn't a requirement. Check out the Adore softphone app. I'm not sure where it pulls it's CODECs, but you can even do HD voice on the app. Adore is multi-platform.

Note I haven't found one MVNO that let's you use their LTE. Well I haven't looked at Sprint because...well...it is Sprint! T-Mobile 4g (as opposed to their LTE) seems to have a lot of latency. T-Mobile LTE on the other hand is great. I get 33 to 38 mbps down and about half that up.

Yeah. I find that 100 minutes is enough, but my girlfriend regularly goes 20-30 minutes over and the $0.10/min still makes it a great deal. Really, unless you average more than 250-300 minutes a month there is no other competitive plan (provided T-mobile coverage fits your needs).

I've never needed VOIP or Google Voice, but I would like to see Google add voice-only calling to Hangouts (like Apple did with Facetime).

The latter varies per country, although it is now the same rate for all foreign EU countries.

This is not necessarily always true. The EU setup maximum rates for roaming charges for all EU operators. Prices can still be lower, and differentiated between countries and operators. In some countries, Vodafone offers "free" roaming for a daily (€3) or monthly (€15) fee that's only valid for Vodafone operators across Europe (which includes Albânia and Turkey but not Denmark, Poland, and others).

Paying to recieve calls is what I always find most astounding about USA.

Is this because the caller would otherwise pay more to dial a cellphone, and cannot differentiate by the number?

---

It dates back to when carphones cost a dollar a minute ($2-3/min after inflation) and the carriers wanted to keep people from placing a 10sec "call me" call outbound on the phone and then having a long free call when the other person called them back.

Here in Europe you usually pay a certain rate depending both on the kind of number you're calling (landline? mobile? foreign?) and on the kind of plan you use to make the call (landline? specific mobile plan?). If you call from landline to mobile, it's going to be more expensive than from landline to landline, but the caller pays for everything all the time (up to the border). Only if the receiver is in a country that is not his own does he pay a certain extra amount for receiving the call, on top of what the caller pays. The reason is that the caller cannot know whether or not the receiver is in the receiver's own country, so it would be unfair to surprise him with extra costs. So you always know what you are paying per minute as the caller (a mobile number starts with certain digits).

So let's say I am a Dutch landline and I'm calling a Dutch mobile number that happens to be on vacation in Belgium. I then pay the normal rate for calling to a domestic mobile number as specified in the contract of my landline, and the receiver pays the rate specified in his (Dutch) contract for "receiving calls in foreign country x". The latter varies per country, although it is now the same rate for all foreign EU countries. If my friend calls me, in the same situation, he pays the rate specified in his mobile contract for "calling from foreign country x", and I as the receiver pay nothing, because I am in my own country. Calling from a foreign country is typically more expensive than receiving in a foreign country.

In the US local calls (typically within ~20 miles) are generally flatrate with longer distance calls historically metered per minute (flatrate pricing is available now but wasn't 20-30 years ago). In theory the operators could've added another billing class; but it would've been simpler for the carphone companies to do it all internally than to get a bunch of other landline companies onboard with the change. There were also probably fairness/soak the rich considerations involved since the average carphone (and later brick phone) user was much more affluent than normal and their paying for a $20 phone call was much less painful than it would for an average person.

Now it's only around because people shopping just by numbers would see a headline line number that was bigger in a plan that charged both directions; and with current plans increasingly going unlimited by default it's gradually becoming a non-issue.

Anyone here using Straight Talk? I'm considering using it for out of contract iPhone 4S for my kid. It is a relatively good fit because this is AT&T country, and Straight Talk uses their network and supports the 4S. However inside my house, due to southern US construction techniques (brick over metal coated plywood walls and metal coated sheeting on the roof) reception is bad enough inside that we've needed to use a femtocell.

I have not used my Lycamobile for a while and it has now stopped working. Why is this? We automatically deactivate SIM cards if you do not use them to make a call or send a text for more than 120 days. Unfortunately these SIM cards cannot be reconnected and the cell number also stops being available for you to use after this time.

I have not used my Lycamobile for a while and it has now stopped working. Why is this? We automatically deactivate SIM cards if you do not use them to make a call or send a text for more than 120 days. Unfortunately these SIM cards cannot be reconnected and the cell number also stops being available for you to use after this time.

Well, from looking at the web page, it looks like you switch to the PaYGo plan, deposit $10, then make 4 calls a year for the next 125 years to keep the number.

The SII was an "extremely crappy" phone? Sounds like some revisionist history to me. The SII was the phone that Samsung found their feet with. Sure, it doesn't have the latest OS (though it does have up to 4.1.2 depending on carrier) and it has performance issues with newer apps/OSes (unavoidable and even older iPhones do as well). It may not have been the slam dunk that the SIII was, but it was a great field-goal for Samsung and paved the way for the SIII in consumer mindshare.

I third or fourth Ting for a MVNO for anyone that has severely skewed usage, especially if they share with someone else that needs what they don't use heavily & vice-versa. I put my mother onto my plan when I signed up, as her data needs fit into what's left of the 500mb when I'm done, the few texts/minutes I use fit easily into the remainder of the 100 min & 100 texts, and the $31 total bill is only $6 more than I'd pay on my own.

If I was considering TextNow, I'd be a bit concerned by the number of Amazon reviews of the app complaining about pornographic ads, picture texts, and straight-up junk calls hitting the user or people they contacted through the service. That suggests that the company isn't safeguarding user data as carefully as they claim to.

I have not used my Lycamobile for a while and it has now stopped working. Why is this? We automatically deactivate SIM cards if you do not use them to make a call or send a text for more than 120 days. Unfortunately these SIM cards cannot be reconnected and the cell number also stops being available for you to use after this time.

Well, from looking at the web page, it looks like you switch to the PaYGo plan, deposit $10, then make 4 calls a year for the next 125 years to keep the number.

exactly, you have to make or receive a call (or a text) at least once every 120 days, but other than that the credit do not expire like with other carriers.